In 2014, one of my goals is to update this blog on a semi-regular basis (every week? Every two weeks? We’ll see how it goes). I’m starting here by outlining some topics that I hope to cover with the help of guest bloggers in the next few months.

Part of this effort will involve expanding our guest bloggers to include anonymous writers, so that we can try to cover some of these issues with greater honesty. Many people have approached me to say that they want to write something, but have said they are afraid to speak their truths online. I hope that this blog will provide these important voices with some writing space soon. (If you haven’t contacted me yet with an idea because you have been hesitating to put your name on something, I hope that you will take this as an open invitation!).

My friends over at Hook & Eye posted today about dreaming communities of care in the academy. What a wonderful thought. I love it. And I have to say that I have experienced the generosity that they speak of here more often than I have not in my academic life. I try to pay it forward as much as I can, but I am also someone who is imperfectly generous and who can have difficulty setting boundaries on such things at times. I imagine most of us struggle with this.

This is a sketch I doodled of myself during a recent academic event. I drew a lot when I was a kid. I never do it anymore (you might see why after looking at this). But this represents how I felt while listening to someone smart talk while at the same time I was thinking about whether or not my kid was asleep. Yes, I have entered into that strange zone that so many professional mamas before me have experienced and expressed, of trying to divide yourself in half and on being amazing at two very hard things. One friend described clipping her newborn’s fingernails as being harder than writing a dissertation and a first book combined. Another claimed that she was constantly searching for words postpartum that just would not come to mind, to the point that she referred to a paddle as a canoe-stick. I really (REALLY) hate the term “mommy-brain,” so I will forever describe what I’m experiencing instead as canoe-stick brain. It seems to make more sense anyway.